ANTONI TÀPIES PUIG (Barcelona, 1923 - 2012). "Drawing with an angle", 1963. Pencil on paper. Signed in the lower right corner. Provenance: Galerie van de Loo, Munich. Acquired from this gallery by a private collector in 1965. Exhibitions: Galerie van de Loo, Munich, "Antoni Tàpies, Gouachen, Zeichnungen und Collagen", 1965. Work catalogued and reproduced in "Tàpies: obra completa: 1961-1968", Vol.II, A. Agustí. Barcelona, 1990, p 176, n.1226. Size: 73 x 102 cm; 87 x 116,5 cm (frame). In his works from the early sixties, Tàpies often creates iconographic palimpsests arranged one on top of the other in such a way as to suggest cryptic messages or anonymous graffiti left on a wall. This is the case here: barely outlined women s breasts, indecipherable writing on the lower layer and a wedge-shaped sign. This drawing belongs to a period in which the artist carried out an underhand critique of Francoism, developing a hermetic language and choosing poor materials impregnated with memories. His plastic interest in traces, marks... is also reflected in this composition, simple but full of echoes. It was also around this time that he began to introduce fragments of the human body to allude to abuses of power. In this drawing, therefore, we could be in the embryonic stage of what would give rise to material paintings such as the 1966 Nude. Co-founder of "Dau al Set" in 1948, Tàpies began to exhibit at the Salones de Octubre in Barcelona, as well as at the Salón de los Once held in Madrid in 1949. After his first solo exhibition at the Galerías Layetanas, he travels to Paris in 1950, with a grant from the Institut Français. In those years he began to take part in the Venice Biennale, exhibited again at the Layetanas and, after a show in Chicago, in 1953 he had a solo exhibition at Martha Jackson s gallery in New York. Since then he has shown his work, both in group and solo exhibitions, all over the world, in leading galleries and museums such as the Guggenheim in New York and the Musée d Art Moderne in Paris. Since the 1970s, anthologies have been devoted to him in Tokyo (1976), New York (1977 and 2005), Rome (1980), Amsterdam (1980), Madrid (1980), Venice (1982), Milan (1985), Vienna (1986) and Brussels (1986). Throughout his career he has received numerous prizes and distinctions, including the Praemium Imperiale of Japan, the National Culture Prize, the Grand Prix for Painting in France, the Wolf Foundation for the Arts (1981), the Gold Medal of the Generalitat de Catalunya (1983), the Prince of Asturias Prize for the Arts (1990), the Picasso Medal of Unesco (1993) and the Velázquez Prize for the Plastic Arts (2003). A great defender of Catalan culture, of which he is deeply imbued, Tàpies is a great admirer of the mystical writer Ramón Llull, as well as of Romanesque art and Gaudí s architecture. At the same time, he appreciates Eastern art and philosophy, which, like his own work, blur the boundary between matter and spirit, between man and nature. Influenced by Buddhism, his paintings show how pain, both physical and spiritual, is inherent to life. Antoni Tàpies is represented in major museums all over the world, such as the foundation that bears his name in Barcelona, the Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Guggenheim in Berlin, Bilbao and New York, the Fukoka Art Museum in Japan, the MoMA in New York and the Tate Gallery in London.